VMware’s Diane Greene about virtual future

End User Computing blog.

VMware&#8217;s Diane Greene about virtual future

Jun 5, 2008
• Sven Huisman

EWeek.com had a Q&A with VMware‘s president and CEO Diane Greene. She talks about how virtualization has changed the last year and how she thinks virtualization will develop the next 12-18 months. It’s a good read, and here are some things that interested me the most:

Next, we will be bringing out some new technologies around scalable image management. Everyone always says, “The desktop? How come now?” Everybody has been trying to do it for years. Well, this new technology that we will be deploying lets you run online and offline, so it lets you check your virtual machine out and then check back in.

She was also asked what she think’s about Hyper-V, Microsoft’s soon to be released virtualization product:

They are coming in with a point product—with a 1.0 hypervisor. VMware is a new software infrastructure—it’s an architecture, and we are transforming how software is developed and delivered with a broad suite of products, a broad suite of alliances and a broad suite of APIs that are integrated with the industry. It is apples and oranges.

Oke, she’s not afraid, because VMware offers an Infrastructure, an architecture. A braod range of products. But how about the hypervisor (ESX(i))? What’s going to happen with VMware’s pricing of ESX(i) when Hyper-V is coming out (for $ 28,-)? I think on VMworld 2008 there will be announced that ESXi will be a lot cheaper (maybe for free), because when you have ESXi, you also need Virtual Center. And when you have that, you want VMotion, DRS and HA, because you’re infrastructure needs to be flexible and dynamic. After that, you maybe want to automate and maybe you are going to virtualize your desktops… ESXi will be the enabler for VMware to sell more products, so why not give it for free?

Update:

I just found a video where Chris Wolf from VMware says that the hypervisor price must and will go down eventually. I still believe eventually is going to be at VMWorld 2008.